Bsmooth wrote:
Beautiful shot, almost has a painterly effect, do you do anything special in your post processing to get this look, If its OK to ask ?

I don't usually do a whole lot to my work, as I like to keep it more natural looking as much as possible. The current version has a couple of luminosity masks in place to help bring out some definition in the flowers in the foreground, and the clouds above the mountain. These were largely necessary because this was a single shot with no grad filters (I did add one in Lightroom though), and I deliberately didn't apply any Whites recovery so the lighter regions were darker than I wanted them to be coming out of LR. I actually had to desaturate it a bit after the masks were down because the color in the sky was getting juiced a bit too much.

swingthis1 wrote:
I will be up at Rainier in mid September - any advice on place to go and see? We are staying at Paradise Inn so I did want to hit up Reflection lake and this depending on where it is in the park.

Mid September you should start to see some huckleberry turning red up in the high country - Chinook Pass and the eastern half of Paradise (particularly around Edith Creek) are the best places to start for that, and maybe some of the Mountain Ash will be leaning toward orange by then too, but usually the best color up at Rainier hits in October so you may be a bit early for it. Flowers will almost certainly be done by then, though the Monkeyflower seems to be late this year so you might be able to find some of that lingering around the streams at higher elevations - try the upper crossings of the Paradise River and Edith Creek on the Skyline Trail (go out to Myrtle Falls and Edith Creek, then take the first left after the creek and climb all the way up).

Reflection Lakes are always generally pretty good, and there may be some decent hints of color changing there too, but be aware that there is some serious road construction going on through the end of this season, and there might be disruptions in the Reflection Lakes area (it was all open and accessible when I was up there about a month ago though). You may want to try out Bench Lake too - a very underrated spot and easy to get to.